South Georgia Island

So when we talked last time, Afua, about fiction and nonfiction, there is a particular skill that some historians have, particularly when you're dealing with primary materials, where you can quote verbatim, you can quote, uh, orders that are given, you can quote doubts of officers talking to each other trying to work out what's going on.

And that kind of sense of drama of when, uh, Argentina put soldiers onto South Georgia and onto the Falklands i- in the spring of 1982, they didn't catch the British government completely by surprise, but very largely by surprise.

And the question of how there should be a reaction, what would've happened if Mrs. Thatcher hadn't decided to put a task force together before she addressed to the House, House of Parliament, House, House of Commons, there could've been, uh, her government could've fallen.

And, and as it happened, and when we did our, our four-part series on Thatcher, if you'll remember, you know, Thatcher took a huge amount of political kudos and credit from not just the outcome of the Falklands War, but the decision-making process that she put together, which went against all of the advice she had from some of her senior politicians.

Where would this have come from then? I mean, we associate whaling with one or two countries now.

Well, this one comes from South Georgia.

So Falkland Island, sort of round that part.

Yeah.

South Atlantic, South Georgia.

Yes.

And, um, we had a library open day recently, and there were quite a few young people who had no idea that whaling was a thing, and the in- extraordinary international efforts that were made in the 20th century to bring those numbers down.

You have Bermuda, Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

South America, the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

Africa, St. Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, which are all sort of somewhere between Africa and South America.

Asia, we have the British Indian Ocean Territory.

But from a British perspective, they're sovereign base areas and they contain British military facilities.

So I think we'll rule them out too.

Yeah, and sadly, I think we have to rule out South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

But with the caveat that museum staff there in South Georgia have played matches before against, I think, passing ships on this pitch that is the most boggy pitch in the world.

Oh, okay.

So on December 5th, 1914, an explorer named Ernest Shackleton left South Georgia aboard the endurance.

South Georgia is close to Antarctica.

It's like an island.

Oh, okay.

1914.

And sorry, because I did get kind of zeroed in on the island.

Yeah, south of what, though? It's just called South Georgia.

So while most of the crew waited on Elephant Island, Shackleton and a few other men set off on a lifeboat.

They traveled 800 miles across the stormy Southern Ocean until they reached South Georgia two weeks later.

But their ordeal wasn't over yet.

They needed to reach the populated part of South Georgia, which was on the northern coast.

This meant another journey by land or sea.

Judging a sea voyage to be too dangerous, Shackleton and two other men began an arduous 36-hour trek over mountains and glaciers.

I then went on to Ecuador and on to Galapagos.

for that one when i did allegedly the antarctic peninsula south georgia and the falklands together although the ship broke down and we never got to south georgia oh i was gutted and subsequently been but yes that was disappointing to say the least

have you been through the drake passage

I have.